Male Doctors Bill Medicare for More Services Than Female Doctors

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Via German Lopez, today brings us an interesting study from Andrew Fitch of NerdWallet. Long story short, he finds that male doctors get paid a lot more by Medicare than female doctors.

Obviously there are several reasons for this. Chief among them: Higher paid specialties tend to be dominated by men, and men see more Medicare patients than women. But here’s the most interesting bit:

Male doctors perform more services per patient treated. To explore this, NerdWallet Health devised a metric to calculate a physician’s average “service volume” per patient. We found that male doctors billed Medicare, on average, for one more procedure per patient than female physicians (5.7 services performed per patient by male doctors vs. 4.7 services per patient by female doctors).

This gap in service volume is true across specialties. Male doctors performed more services per patient than female doctors across nearly all specialties. In a specialty like pathology — where doctors infrequently provide services directly to patients — we found no variation in average service volume.

On average, male doctors bill 5.7 services per patient vs. 4.7 for women! That’s a huge gap. And it’s not just that cardiologists tend to bill for more services than, say, pulmonologists. Even within specialties, men bill for more services than women.

But why? Are they just generally more aggressive? Are they gaming the system? Do sicker patients prefer male doctors for some reason? If this analysis turns out to be true, it would sure be fascinating for someone to follow up and try to figure out what’s going on.

FIGHT DISINFORMATION:

Disinformation is one of the biggest threats our democracy faces. Like our reporting on dark money, it is one of those stories behind all the other stories.